Reynolds to Cuillo, it’s an evolving stage

There is a big for-sale sign up on the Cuillo Centre for the Arts in downtown West Palm Beach. I have childhood recollections, dating to the late 1950s, of the theater as one of the area’s most popular movie houses.

The Florida, built in 1949, was actually a relatively new theater compared to The Palms, across the street and The Paramount, in Palm Beach. It remained standing after the Palm Beach Mall was built and newer theaters began to spring up in the westward expansion. The same cannot be said for the Palms and Paramount.

I’m not quite sure when The Florida closed its doors to movie patrons, but it eventually became home to the Florida Repertory Company in the latter 1980s. After falling again into disuse, the theater was revived in 1996 when former Mayor Nancy Graham courted the Burt Reynolds Institute for Theater Training with promises to renovate the facility for it. Reynolds was running the BRITT operation out of a small black-box theater after having sold his Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater.

Reynolds’ dinner theater had never really made money during its roughly 10-year history in Jupiter. He made up shortfalls with his own personal funds so as to provide a stage venue for his television and film-actor friends and teach fledgling actors in the BRITT program. Even though financial difficulties forced him to sell the theater in 1989, he continued the BRITT program on a shoestring.

To Reynolds, Graham’s invitation to back the BRITT with a state-of-the-art 370-seat theater facility in downtown West Palm Beach must have seemed too good to be true. It was.

About $1.3 million of city money was funneled into the project. Once the true cost of the deal became known, Graham came under a great deal of political criticism. After only four months of operation for the theater, she did a turnabout and used her influence to oust the BRITT and publicly laid the responsibility for the debacle at Reynolds’ feet. This prompted me to create my cartoon of March of 1997.

Shortly after Graham’s backstabbing act, Palm Beacher Bob Cuillo bought the already renovated theater and leased it to Frank Sugrue’s theater production company. Cuillo took over operations after Sugrue defaulted on the rent in 2000. He closed the door on theater operations last June.

West Palm Beach has indicated it would like to reacquire the building from Cuillo for the Dramaworks theater company, currently operating out of a small space on Banyan Street. That deal seems to be in limbo because the city and Cuillo are a little more than a half-million dollars apart on the price.

Still, with the West Palm Beach waterfront project finished and Mayor Lois Frankel obviously looking for more attractions downtown, we might still expect the page to turn on the story of the old Florida Theater once again.